If the Navy was rejuvenated since the rise of the New Order, the
Army was revived from the dead. During the days of the Old Republic the
Army degenerated into a poorly trained police force with fancy uniforms.
They performed garrison duty on member worlds, often as a barrier between
squabbling locals. The Navy was responsible for getting the Army to its
destination and for picking up what as left. There was lip service paid to
the concept of orbital support, but the Navy was stretched too thinly to afford
sitting in stationary orbit for the duration of a surface campaign. The
Navy jealously guarded its starfighters, so the Army was denied any effective
means of maintaining an orbit free of enemy spacecraft once the Navy
departed. Morale was often low and the quality of Army personnel bordered
on non-existent.

With the New Order, the Army was completely overhauled.
Rigorous training and recruitment programs were re-established, and the mission
of the Army was expanded. Drop missions into hostile territory were
considered to be routine for normal troopers rather than the province of a few
elite units. Training for complex assaults was the norm, and Imperial
doctrine specified the Navy's mission to be support for surface forces during
critical phases of an operation.

Doctrine further specified that permanent garrisons or units
expecting surface campaigns of significant duration would have significant Naval
assets, such as TIE fighters, attached to the Army units for the whole of the
mission. These assets were determined well in advance of the mission and
soon standardized so an Army officer could know what he had to work with for a
particular type of mission.

The Army used to be almost exclusively
under the command of the planetary governments of ht worlds on which they
served. this was due to necessity more than anything else; most
worlds had an arrangement where by they paid half the expenses and provided half
the material of any Army unit engaged in operations on their world, unlike the
Navy whose expenses were paid for by the Republic as a whole. This one
difference was perhaps the major cause fore the decline of the Army. The
worlds which needed help form the Republic and were not among wealthiest
continually complained about the cost of surface forces deployed on their
planets. the average amount spend on the Army plummeted while the navy's
expenditures remained constant.

With the New Order, and especially since the abolishment of the
Senate, the Army has become the physical manifestation of the Empire throughout
the galaxy. Whether black-clad Imperial soldiers or white-armored
Stormtroopers, the Imperial Army has grown into the mailed fist that pounds the
thousand-thousand worlds of the Galactic Empire into submission.

The Army took a different track from the
Navy when it experienced its phenomenal growth. The army kept its ranks
the same, but increased the number of subordinate officers for each rank
above. This decreased the ratio of officers to troops and gave the
Imperial Army a very lean fighting force.

The establishment of the New Order gave
the Army the opportunity to clear out its deadwood as well as remove those
officers who might be ideologically opposed the the new regime. Over
three-quarters of the Army's officers were weeded out during the first days of
the New Order.

Since the Battle of Yavin, the two forces
have been moved closer together as regular Army detachments have been
assigned to Navy vessels to create more complete combat units.